For no more than a few days around the start of April, Edgar and Burtha flexed their fundraising muscles. But Edgar’s activities caught the eye of the police, because he seems to have been skimming cash from the proceeds. He was consequently picked up on a charge of obtaining money under false pretenses. Even then, Burtha—who had completely bought the idea of her husband being a blameless victim of persecution—stuck by him.
Lacking sufficient evidence to prosecute Edgar, the cops ended up turning him loose. From now on, though, the San Francisco Police Department was sure to be watching him, so the couple opted for a fresh start in Oakland, just a ferry ride across the bay. Within days of arriving in this modern-looking port city, where U.S. soldiers and sailors dotted the warm, dry sidewalks, Edgar and Burtha were presented with a fortuitous opening that promised to reverse the decline in their fortunes.
10
From the wedge-shaped rooftop of the First National Bank Building, Edgar could see Oakland’s retail district nine stories below. He and Burtha, who were treating their visit to the city as a honeymoon, were in the middle of a publicity stunt worthy of Edgar’s erstwhile friend Frank Newman. The event was held under the banner of Oakland’s Liberty Loan Committee. Four days earlier, the committee had launched their campaign for the Third Liberty Loan, the latest in a series of nationwide government bond issues used to underwrite the war against Germany and her allies. Having set a vast target of $6.9 million, the Oakland committee had hired Chief White Elk as a fundraiser, his abilities vouchsafed by a stack of testimonials from the mayors of numerous cities.
Most of those documents were forged, presumably by Edgar, who’d shown a prior readiness to fake official paperwork. In the testimonials, he and Burtha received the highest praise for raising enormous sums of money on behalf of the Liberty Loan, War Savings Stamp, and other fundraising drives. Edgar’s new employers were left with the impression that they were lucky to obtain his services for such a modest fee.
He’d already delivered an eloquent speech to the members of a women’s club in East Oakland, but the event at the bank represented his first big test. Edgar and Burtha were joined on the rooftop by a sizable flock of movie people and local dignitaries, among them a former chief justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court. For events of this nature, Burtha wore her beaded Native American attire, plus a headband with a feather protruding from it.
Newsreel cameramen with hand-cranked movie cameras were there to record her and Edgar presiding over the event. Its centerpiece involved Edgar auctioning Liberty Bonds. Whoever made the highest single bid would be awarded the bonus of being permitted to kiss Princess Ah-Tra-Au-Saun. At the opposite end of the prize range were lapel buttons issued to anyone who bought a Liberty Bond. Pressure was thus exerted on holdouts, who faced further shaming through the practice of newspapers listing all local purchasers.
Edgar ended up selling $22,000 in bonds—a sum of such magnitude that it would cover the cost of training and equipping almost one thousand infantrymen. The largest individual bid came from S. H. Kitto, one of the senior staff at the First National Bank. Kitto coughed up $3,000.
As Burtha waited for him to claim his prize, Kitto blushed and protested that he was “too far along in years to be up to those tricks.” Burtha was left to wonder whether her charms were fading.
“Why don’t you kiss her?” the onetime Supreme Court judge said to the embarrassed banker. “If you don’t kiss her, I will.”
“If you do kiss her, it won’t be…official,” Kitto answered in a moment of pedantry.
While the newsreel cameramen impatiently cranked their cameras, the judge stared at Kitto, who was still blushing. And Kitto stared back at the judge.
Standing nearby, Edgar grinned at this absurd spectacle.
* * *
—
Well on his way to becoming the sensation of the Oakland campaign, revered for his ability to chivy bashful dollars out of people’s pockets, Edgar spoke at a lunch hosted the next day by the city’s Rotary Club. The diners included a millionaire who reacted by purchasing $50,000 in Liberty Bonds, enough to construct a one-hundred-bed military hospital. Some of that money would surely have snuck into Edgar’s billfold without Burtha knowing.
Edgar also gave fundraising speeches at a large public meeting, at the shipyard workers’ yearly jamboree, and at an upscale women’s club. So effective was he that the Oakland campaign was swiftly awarded an “honor flag,” a sought-after trophy created by central government to reward areas exceeding their sales targets. Edgar’s newfound renown in Oakland made him a welcome visitor to the city’s most affluent homes, where curtsying hostesses acknowledged his eminence.
Seizing the opportunity to translate admiration for him into something tangible, he targeted one of the many automobile dealers along San Francisco’s Van Ness Avenue, where their architecturally promiscuous showrooms—part Grecian, part Colonial, part Mission style—featured flouncily lettered advertisements for Buick, Mercury, and other manufacturers painted across their walls. Edgar more than likely viewed the middle-aged founder of the F. J. Linz Motor Company as an easy mark, thanks to his Germanic surname.
In the year since America’s entry into the European war, rampant suspicion toward German Americans like Linz had spiraled into outright hostility, which often took absurd forms. Banning German books and music from libraries, for instance. Or renaming sauerkraut “liberty cabbage.” Sometimes the same impulse found more oppressive and violent expressions. Yellow paint was daubed on buildings owned by anyone suspected of “pro-Germanism.” People were encouraged to spy on German neighbors. And speaking German in public became dangerous, certain jurisdictions even declaring it illegal. Under these circumstances, Linz had a powerful incentive to make a public display of support for America. He was suckered into assisting the Liberty Loan campaign by lending a car to Edgar and Burtha, so they could fundraise more widely. This expensive vehicle was a four-seat Chandler Dispatch. It came with a soft-top, pale bodywork, and stylish whitewall tires.
Edgar and his wife now swelled the number of inexperienced motorists on California’s roads. Many of what passed for highways were no more than strips of rutted dirt that turned into mud whenever it rained, and were unlit at night, save for occasional illuminated billboards flaring out of the darkness—tricky conditions for even the most seasoned of drivers.
* * *
—
On the morning of Thursday, April 18, 1918, Edgar was in Oakland, breakfasting alone. He’d gone to the large and inexpensive Saddle Rock restaurant, which regularly laid on music and “refined dancing”—a term distinguishing it from the more exuberant styles fast becoming popular. Not that Edgar had much time for dancing, refined or otherwise. Another packed day of campaigning beckoned. First, though, he needed to finish his coffee.
He’d positioned himself at a table near Saddle Rock’s entrance, where customers couldn’t fail to notice him. One such customer was the mailman from the Oakland Tribune, based just across Thirteenth Street. The mailman went from table to table, selling both War Savings Stamps and their cheaper alternative—Thrift Stamps. He knew about the money Edgar had already raised on behalf of the Liberty Loan campaign, so he had no intention of trying to sell stamps to him.
Yet Edgar snagged the mailman and said, “Wait a minute.” Playing to the gallery, he then insisted upon paying for a dollar’s worth of twenty-five-cent Thrift Stamps, the showiness of his gesture outweighing the stinginess of his purchase. He told the mailman to stick them on a Thrift Card—one of the cards used by anyone collecting these stamps. “Give it to the first boy you meet,” Edgar instructed.
Dutifully, the mailman affixed the stamps to a Thrift Card. As he walked toward the offices of the Oakland Tribune, he crossed paths with a young colleague. The mailman handed the Thrift Card to his coworker and said, “Here’s a present to you from the best American in the United States.”
—
Since breakfast, Edgar and his wife had traveled across the Bay to San Francisco, where they’d been lunch guests at the opulent Palace Hotel. Their hosts were a group of industrialists to whom Edgar auctioned more than $4,000 of Liberty Bonds. And in the city of Berkeley, not far north of Oakland, he’d been treated to an early-evening reception at the Shattuck, one of Berkeley’s leading hotels, where he gave a short talk and sang for his supper—in both a literal and a metaphorical sense.
For all his exertions, Edgar still possessed lots of energy, which was just as well because he’d gone straight from the Shattuck to his third event of the day. Ahead of him now were three thousand enthusiastic people, gathered around the Gallic-looking white stone façade of city hall. From the top of the steps leading up to its entrance, a waggish local singing star led the crowd in a rendition of a ragtime song popular in the trenches. Backed by the cheerful, brassy rhythm of a seventy-piece school band, they sang, “Good morning, Mr. Zip-Zip-Zip / With your hair cut just as short as mine…”
It wouldn’t be long before Edgar’s big moment arrived. He was the event’s principal speaker, described in the ads as a “full-blooded Cherokee millionaire” and “an orator of no mean ability.” When the time came for him to address the crowd, he leapt onto the table in front of him, earning a wholehearted ovation. With barely an instant’s hesitation, he delivered his opening line. “How many here have Liberty buttons on?”
Numerous hands thrust into the air.
He asked how many people didn’t have buttons.
Just as many hands were raised.
“I am ashamed of you. Do you have to come here to have an Indian shame you into buying bonds that you ought to be glad to buy?
“I am a real American,” he continued. “America belonged to my forefathers, and your forefathers took it from them. If we were to ask you to pay for what they took from us, it would require a dozen Liberty Loan drives. But we do not ask that. We ask only that you show yourselves as much Americans as we show ourselves to be.
“Of the pitifully few Indians left in the United States today, five thousand have given themselves to the service of Uncle Sam.” It was an imaginary figure he’d used before—a figure that sounded impressively high yet represented well under a quarter of the true number of Native Americans in military and Red Cross units. Referring to the wider Native American population, which had invested generously in the government fundraising campaign, he conjured another figure from his imagination: “Of their money they have given $9 million to the Third Liberty Loan. Can you say as much? If you are real Americans, you will subscribe to the loan, and if you are not real Americans, this is no place for you—you should be back with the kaiser where you belong.”
Edgar explained that he’d served America in ways other than just selling Liberty Bonds. “I have given myself to my country and my flag,” he added. “I plunged fifty feet from the crow’s nest of the Antilles when she was struck by a torpedo from a German submarine. But it takes more than a U-boat to kill a real American—as they will find out.
“I could tell you dozens of stories of atrocities I saw in France between trips of the transports upon which I served, but I will not. I am here to awaken in you that impulse to buy Liberty Bonds. I want you to buy—and buy tonight. Who is going to be the first to subscribe here?”
Then he invited people to come forward to his makeshift rostrum and open their wallets. So many people bunched around him that a half-dozen members of the Berkeley Liberty Loan Committee were needed to administer their purchases.
After the city’s mayor offered to hand over an extra $500 if anyone invested that much, a young woman obliged. She earned a kiss from Edgar.
In total, his assistants obtained pledges to invest many thousands of dollars and collected $19,000 of down payments, comparable to the cost of at least six of the new tanks used on the battlefields of France. People were still waiting to purchase bonds when Edgar began his final duty of the evening more than an hour later.
Two hundred members of the local branch of the Camp Fire Girls—an outdoorsy youth organization whose prize-giving ceremony he’d attended the previous day—converged on city hall. In front of it was a massive bonfire, the glow from which must have been visible for miles. Doing their best to duplicate Edgar’s every intricate movement, the Camp Fire Girls performed what he called “the Cherokee Snake Dance,” its provenance in all likelihood as bogus as Chief White Elk himself.
* * *
—
Around that part of California, the scuttlebutt had it that neither Chief White Elk nor Princess Ah-Tra-Ah-Saun were real Indians. Soon those rumors percolated into newspapers as far away as Kansas and Oklahoma.
Only a few days after the end of the Third Liberty Loan campaign, Edgar and Burtha left the Bay Area. Despite all the gossip, they managed to secure employment on a U.S. Navy recruiting tour of some of the state’s northern cities. Several marines and almost two dozen musically adept school students from the Oakland Boys’ Club Band, which included a brilliant young cornet soloist, were on the tour. Leading it was Frank Spaulding, a roguish twenty-five-year-old with dark, slicked-back hair, a toothy grin, and narrow yet expressive eyes that hinted at his swaggering self-confidence. Edgar had probably first encountered him in Berkeley. He wore the blue uniform of a seaman in the U.S. Navy, his white sailors’ cap perched jauntily on the back of his head. The son of a Washington State preacher, Frank held the rank of pharmacist’s mate. As someone trained to provide basic medical care for navy personnel, he had access to morphine and cocaine, both legally available on prescription. He may have been responsible for introducing these to Edgar, who developed a taste for how the drugs recalibrated his senses, morphine plunging him into a warm bath of woozy serenity, cocaine giving him a pulse-quickening surge of euphoria and even more boundless self-belief than ever, fostering his more highfalutin fantasies.
The ability to procure prescription narcotics was not the only talent of Frank’s that Edgar could appreciate. Frank happened to be a compelling speaker. And he possessed a sweet and tuneful singing voice. It had earned him the tag of “Singing Sailor Spaulding” and made him a popular performer at recruiting rallies, where he sang propagandist and mawkish numbers such as “Somewhere in France Is the Lily.”
By Wednesday, June 26, 1918, the tour had, temporarily minus the Oakland Boys’ Club Band, arrived in Redding, where orange trees and palms rimmed the small but handsome central plaza. Like many of California’s cities, it would, back where Edgar came from, have qualified as nothing more than a town.
Outside St. Caroline’s Hospital that day, Edgar and Frank took part in a flag-raising ceremony, but it was marred by the intervention of J. W. Schoonover, a local attorney and rancher. He groused about them raising the Stars and Stripes in front of the hospital. By doing so, they were, he argued, perpetrating an act of spite toward Miss Ehemann, its German superintendent. His remarks got him into an undignified row with Edgar and Frank.
There was a sequel the next day. In the lobby of Redding’s leading hotel, the Golden Eagle, which was owned by two brothers of German origin, Schoonover launched another verbal broadside against Edgar and Frank. He said that Frank was guilty of German baiting just by wearing a uniform in the hotel. Then he stated his willingness to defend any otherwise defenseless woman who was proud of her country. Invited to specify which woman he had in mind, Schoonover said it was Miss Ehemann.
Yet Edgar delayed exacting his revenge until Friday evening. When he stepped into the spotlight at the Redding Theater, where he was due to sell War Savings Stamps, he couldn’t resist accusing a local man of rooting for the Germans, though he coyly omitted the man’s name. He must have known that his reticence would whet the crowd’s curiosity. There were repeated calls for Edgar to identify the anonymous German sympathizer. With consummate stagecraft, Edgar bowed to these deman
ds by outing J. W. Schoonover. “The words of this man were an insult to me and the uniform I wore—and to Mr. Spaulding,” Edgar thundered. “I shall not leave town until he apologizes to me.”
An apology was not forthcoming. Instead, Edgar’s accusations needled Schoonover into contacting the county police department and asking them to make inquiries about Chief White Elk’s war record.
Before Edgar could suffer the consequences of Schoonover’s request, he and Frank journeyed south to rejoin the Oakland Boys’ Club Band in Marysville, California, where they were set to continue their recruiting campaign despite recent peace overtures by the Germans. About the time Edgar and Frank were traveling through the verdant pastures of the Sacramento Valley, Burtha left the tour so she could visit her elderly parents in Northern California and, it seems, take a break from her husband’s drug taking, which she loathed.
* * *
—
In the attractive little city of Chico, only a shade over forty miles north of Marysville, where Edgar and Frank were due next, Frank received some news from France. His teenage brother, Lee, who was a corporal in the Marine Corps, had been awarded a citation for bravery from General John J. Pershing, commander of the American forces. Reference to Pershing would’ve provided an entrée for Edgar’s well-rehearsed stories about meeting the general on the front line and traveling to Europe “with a contingent of Pershing’s men.” As Edgar must have known, the general was famous for having commanded a company of Apache and Sioux during the earlier war with Mexico.
Frank treated his brother Lee’s commendation by the general as mere sibling one-upmanship, ripe for macho banter. BULLY FOR YOU, Frank wired his brother. YOU’VE ANSWERED GERMANY’S PEACE TERMS, AND THERE ARE A HUNDRED MILLION OTHER ANSWERS IN THE MAIL.
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